After nearly three years since the last significant release, Oracle has published the release of the virtualization system VirtualBox 7.0. The installation packages are available for Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, SLES, RHEL in builds for AMD64 architecture), Solaris, macOS, and Windows.
Key Changes:
- Full encryption support added of virtual machines. Encryption is also applied to saved snapshots and configuration logs.
- The ability to add virtual machines located in cloud environments to Virtual Machine Manager has been implemented. Management of such virtual machines is carried out similarly to virtual machines hosted on the local system.
- A utility for monitoring the resources of running guest systems, designed in the style of the top program, has been integrated into the graphical interface. The utility allows tracking CPU load, memory consumption, I/O intensity, etc.
- The new virtual machine creation wizard has been redesigned, now supporting automated operating system installation in virtual machine.
- A new widget for navigation and searching in the VirtualBox user manual has been added.
- A new notifications center has been added, which standardizes reports related to progress information on operation executions and error messages.
- The graphical interface for all platforms has improved theme support. For Linux and macOS, the native theme engines provided by the platforms are used, while a special engine has been implemented for Windows.
- Icons have been updated.
- The graphical interface has been updated to the latest versions of Qt.
- The graphical interface has improved the display of virtual machine lists, added the ability to select multiple VMs at once, introduced an option to disable the screen saver on the host side, revamped general settings and the wizard, improved mouse handling in multi-monitor configurations on the X11 platform, and reworked the media detection code, with NAT settings moved to the Network Manager utility.
- The functionality for audio recording has transitioned to using the Vorbis format by default for WebM sound containers instead of the previously used Opus format.
- A new type of host sound driver "default" has been added, enabling the migration of virtual machines across different platforms without the need to explicitly change the sound driver. When selecting the "default" driver option in settings, the actual sound driver is automatically chosen based on the operating system in use.
- The Guest Control package has implemented initial support for the automatic update of guest system additions for Linux-based systems, as well as the ability to wait for a virtual machine to reboot when updating guest system additions via the VBoxManage utility.
- A new command "waitrunlevel" has been added to the VBoxManage utility, allowing users to wait for the activation of a specific run level in the guest system.
- Experimental support for the auto-start of virtual machines has been introduced in components for host environments based on Windows, allowing VMs to start independently of user login.
- All kernel-specific extensions have been removed from components for host environments based on macOS, and the hypervisor and vmnet framework provided by the platform are used to run virtual machines. Preliminary support has been added for Apple computers with Apple Silicon ARM chips.
- Tools for resizing the screen in guest systems with Linux have been revamped, along with basic integration with certain desktop environments.
- A 3D driver has been provided that utilizes DirectX 11 on Windows and DXVK on other operating systems.
- Drivers for IOMMU virtual devices have been added (various versions for Intel and AMD).
- Virtual devices for TPM 1.2 and 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) have been implemented.
- USB controller drivers for EHCI and XHCI have been added to the basic set of open drivers.
- Support for booting in Secure Boot mode has been included in the UEFI implementation.
- An experimental feature for debugging guest systems using GDB and KD/WinDbg debuggers has been added.
- Components for integration with OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) have been enhanced with the ability to configure cloud networks through the Network Manager interface, just as host networks and NAT are configured. Local VMs can now connect to the cloud network.
Source: opennet.ru
